Thomas Cook - Sacrificial Ground

“I came into this room for the first time only a few hours ago,” Karen said. “For the first time in many years. I was very surprised by the way it looked. Nothing had changed in all that time. It looked as it had when Angelica was eleven.”

“You haven’t been in this room since then?” Frank asked.

“Absolutely not,” Karen assured him. “It became a real issue for Angelica when she was around eleven. Privacy became an obsession with her. She refused to let anyone in.”

“Even you?”

“I think, especially me.”

“Why?”

“I thought it was just something she was going through,” Karen said, “some sort of prepuberty thing. So I went along with her. But it never changed. Time went by. I didn’t make an issue of it.”

“But why especially you?”

“Big sister, I suppose.”

Frank walked slowly to the center of the room. He remembered the look of Sarah’s room, cluttered, strewn with books and records, perpetually disordered. It was as if she had despised the order Angelica had worked so hard to maintain.

“It sure doesn’t look like a teenager’s room, does it?” Karen asked.

“Not like my daughter’s,” Frank said, before he could stop himself.

“Oh, you have a daughter?” Karen asked.

Frank turned away slightly. “She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

Frank glanced at the bed. “Did Angelica ever have people up here?”

“Not that I know of,” Karen said. She stepped over to the vanity and opened the top drawer. “I found this,” she said, as she handed it to Frank. “It’s a diary.”

Frank took it from her and opened it. “Where did you find it?”

“It was on her bed,” Karen said. “And it was open.”

“Have you read it?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything in it?”

“Odd things,” Karen said. “But only odd because they’re so normal.”

Frank began to flip through the pages. “What do you mean?”

“Well, from the diary, you’d get the impression that Angelica was a very average sort of teenager. She writes about going to parties and sleep-overs. She writes about being the treasurer of the senior class. She writes about being on the prom committee, that sort of thing.” She shook her head. “But she never did any of those things. It was all a lie.” She glanced at the diary. “That’s what I mean about it being odd. It’s about a normal life that never existed.”

Frank continued to flip through the book. The handwriting was extraordinarily neat and precise, the letters carefully formed, the lines utterly straight. It was as if Angelica had drawn the words, rather than written them.

“She lived behind a mask,” Karen said. “That’s all I can figure out.” Her eyes latched on to the diary. “It’s as if she lived an entirely mannered life.”

“Mannered?”

“Yes,” Karen said. “Like when a painting is mannered. There’s nothing real about it. It’s as if the artist decided to copy a feeling he didn’t have himself.”

Frank closed the diary. “I’ll need to keep this.”

“Of course.”

He put it in his coat pocket. “How did Angelica take it when your parents were killed?”

“She was too young to understand it.”

“Did she play with other children?”

“A little,” Karen said, “but I don’t think she ever had a real friend.” She glanced about the room. “You know, this room isn’t strange only because of what’s in it, but because of things that are missing.”

“What things?”

“Letters. There’s not one note to Angelica in this room. There are no books, no records. It’s as if nothing has been added to it from the time she was eleven.”

Frank turned slowly, eyeing the room carefully. At a murder scene, the area was often divided into quadrants and then searched meticulously. His eyes had gotten used to the same method. They turned the room into a grid, then examined each small square of space.

“It’s as if Angelica was some sort of teenage version of Miss Havisham,” Karen said, after a moment. “It’s like time stopped when she was eleven, and after that it was all a fantasy.”

“Unless it was all in secret,” Frank said.

“Another life, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Karen smiled delicately. “You know, I hope she did. And in a way, it doesn’t matter what kind of life it was.” Her eyes darted furiously about the room. “As long as it wasn’t this .”

“We can find out what kind of life it was,” Frank said.

“How?”

“We can start with this book.”

“And do what?”

“Well, for one thing, all those nights she claimed to be at proms and parties, things like that.”

“What about them?”

“If she wasn’t at those places, where was she?”

Karen thought about it. “Most of the time, she was here, I think.”

“Up in her room?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“No, I’m not sure,” Karen said. “I tried to stay out of her life. I knew that that was what she wanted.”

Frank closed the diary. “Maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes they want to be watched over,” Frank told her. “They want to be told ‘no.’”

“I don’t think that was the case with Angelica,” Karen said firmly.

“All right,” Frank said. He lifted the book slightly. “Did you notice any names in here?”

“Names?”

“Friends, fellow students, teachers, anything.”

“She used initials,” Karen told him. “She would write something like ‘Had a great time at L’s,’ or ‘Met with Prom staff: B.T.H.’”

“Telephone numbers?”

“I didn’t see any.”

Frank walked over to the small white telephone that rested on a table next to Angelica’s bed. He took out his notebook and wrote down the number.

“Why do you want that?”

“To find out who she’s been calling,” Frank said.

She looked at him with an odd sympathy. “It must feel odd, to do what you do. I mean, it’s something like a Peeping Tom, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Frank admitted.

He closed the notebook, put it in his pocket and looked up at her. She was standing in the doorway, her body framed by a soft, purplish light. Her beauty swept over him like a thirsty wind. There was a kind of isolation in her eyes, a separateness from ordinary experience, and he wondered if her sister had felt the same aloneness, had walked down lost, desolate streets and listened to the catcalls of the men she passed until there was nothing to do but return to the innocence of a little girl’s room. It was the sort of loneliness he’d known in others, known in himself, and he knew how easily it could turn to rage.

“The play she was in,” he said. “Did you see it?”

“Yes,” Karen said. “It was the only time she ever invited me to anything.” She shook her head slowly. “We’re burying her tomorrow. Will you come to the funeral?”

“Yes,” Frank said.

“It’s part of the routine, I guess,” Karen said.

Frank shrugged. “That’s part of it,” he said, “but it’s not the whole thing.”

15

It was almost noon the next day when Angelica Devereaux was buried in one of Atlanta’s most exclusive cemeteries. It was the sort of exquisitely kept ground that up until recent years had never received the body of a black or a Jew. It held to a certain rigid dignity, the sort that looked as if money couldn’t buy it, even though everyone knew that it was the only thing that could.

“They’ll probably bury the mayor here,” Caleb said, his lips fluttering around the stem of his pipe. “That’ll make integration complete.”

To Frank, it had only mattered that Angelica was being buried. He could still remember the feel of her clothing. He’d gone through it the day before, fingering the pockets of her ordered blouses and neatly folded jeans for some note with a name or number on it. The closets had revealed nothing, and so, as Karen stood in the doorway, he had gone through the drawers of the vanity, then the bureau, had peered under the canopy bed and beneath the primly stuffed pillows. The underside of things revealed no more than their appearances, and a little girl’s room remained a little girl’s room forever.